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Kind of a strangely flippant article. By the end I was annoyed at the author’s tone and dismissiveness of Arnold.
His politics and the Atlantic's are at odds.
He's far from perfect, but what he's accomplished in the US as a kid from Austria . . . absolutely amazing. Over and over.
If the US Constitution didn't prevent it, he'd surely be President. (And I'm from his political antipode.)
Truly is a remarkable man. Achieved all that he did through sheer will. Even if you ignore his movie and political careers, Arnold would be a legend just for his bodybuilding career.
People forget that Arnold and his peers were the pioneers in bodybuilding and achieved all that they did without any set template, industrial support, or even societal approval.
>Achieved all that he did through sheer will.
Including the will to take illegal steroids without which he wins nothing and has no fame or career in public life.
If you think that differs from Lance Armstrong it's probably informative to know why you think that way. (And i do fwiw)
If you think his use is steroids is what got him there you are sorely mistaken.
He was taking steroids under a doctor’s supervision. True. So is everyone else in body building.
This is like saying “Bill Gates accomplished nothing because he was born rich”. Funny how the many others born rich didn’t become among the wealthiest in the world.
Lance’s career couldn’t be different. He went through great lengths to hide what he was doing at a time when they had pretty sophisticated tests going on. How many of his peers used steroids? What percentage? Compare Arnold’s reaction to Lance’s to their steroid using becoming discovered by the masses. They couldn’t be more different.
Professional road racing has a long history of doping.
There are hundreds of thousands of people taking steroids who go to the gym at far larger dosages than the pros to try and look like a pro. None of them looks anywhere near pro bodybuilders.
Steroids help. No one can deny that. The average person might get into pretty good shape using steroids without much effort. You can gain muscle by taking steroids and not training as your body processes protein better.
None of these people taking steroids will ever look like a pro bodybuilder as they don't have the dedication, mental mindset, determination, or work ethic to get there. Pro bodybuilders are a special kind. It's all built on consistency, day in and day out, every day, every week, every month, every year. Every meal is calculated, and every training session is calculated, logged and analysed.
Steroids certainly helped in his bodybuilding, but his single-mindedness made him the best bodybuilder of his time. The same single-mindedness got him a film career and then a political career.
The difference with Lance Armstrong is that pro bodybuilding competitions have never had rules banning performance enhancing drugs. Cycling isn't judge on your body being the biggest unnatural freaks on stage where performance-enhancing-drugs is a given unless you are competing in a completely natural class.
I find your arguments on point, but his will, determination and sacrifice are just like steroids - means that enabled him to be competitive. It’s unfair not to mention his genetics as the most significant factor in his entire jouney.
Arnold‘s story is amazing, but he was surrounded with like minded people at least as much determined to achieve what he did, yet they never did come close to his heights.
There are examples of genetically predispositioned individuals in a lot of sports or competitive activities, and though amazing, we ought to differentiate pure will with blessings of nature, and celebrate the qualities that should be celebrated.
Arnold was a literal and figurative beast, no doubt in that.
> Including the will to take illegal steroids
I don't think steroids were illegal when he was winning his Mr. Olympia titles. His last win was 1980, and steroids were explicitly made illegal in the US in 1990.
Also, when he was winning Mr. Olympias everyone was using steroids. It was a level playing field. Very different from a sport like cycling where steroids or blood doping is banned.
Everyone in body building posture tested leagues is still using steroids. Probably the winners in the tested leagues are using steroids too, just like everyone in cycling is, even though they don’t have untested leagues.
Even if you're anti-steroids (which most of the bodybuilding world is not), sculpting a physique like his doesn't happen without tremendous hard work and dedication.
Steroids can make you more muscular. But making sure that every muscle in your body is equally muscular, proportionate, and vascular isn't something everyone can do.
Steroids don't make anyone more muscular, all they do is increase the capacity for recovery. You still have to put in the work lifting weights and progressing, steroids just helps it go a bit faster and increases the ceiling. That's all
The open secret is that everyone in the IFBB is on steroids. But if you were to just start taking steroids, it’s not going to send you to the top of the IFBB since, you know, everyone else is also taking steroids.
Bodybuilding is an untested “sport”. There are federations that test and that is called natural bodybuilding and the physiques are noticeably smaller. Everyone Arnold competed against and train with used steroids so the playing field was fair. I put sport in quotes above as it really isn’t a sport in my view, even though if asked what sport I do I would say body building (I don’t take steroids and don’t compete so it’s a hobby for me). It’s halfway between sport and art with a sprinkle of something else I can’t articulate.
All that is to say that the comparison to Lance isn’t valid in my view. The equivalent would be saying that Lance Armstrong cheated because he used a fancier bike than everyone else and didn’t win on a cheap Walmart bike. (I’d replace Lance here with another cyclist but I can’t think of any who don’t have steroid doubts on them so let’s just stick with him).
Wow, massive logic failures on show in replies here.
Necessary but not sufficient. https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definition....
For Arnold to win and get famous, steroids were a necessary (but not sufficient) condition. Arnold can be as wondrous, beautiful, tall, wise and shrewd as possibly imaginable but he doesn't win body building comps without them. From there no toe-hold of fame to get to hollywood and beyond. Same for Dwayne Johnson, no way he's in hollywood if not already famous. Are we sensible enough to mention pro-wrestling's steroid issues without going silly about it? This non-acting fame achievement coming first is not so much true for Judy Dench, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep or Bruce Willis, for example. No idea of their drug habits or lack thereof but hard to see them as necessary whatever they are or aren't.
Just like Lance Armstrong. Every cyclist you have ever met (and indeed every cyclist you haven't) doesn't win like he did even if they took the same drugs, blood doping and whatever else, with teams of doctors and pharmacologists to make it all world standard. Like his teammates didn't win. Like all the other Tour de France entrants didn't win. Lance doesn't win you've never heard of him. Lance didn't take all those performance enhancing drugs he isn't even hired as a domestique at the Tour - as amazing as his abilities are.
Necessary, but not sufficient. It's a thing really worth knowing whether you venerate Arnold S. or Lance A. or both or neither or not.
Separate to that. Working out your answer for why you think Arnold and Lance should be thought of differently is instructive and I stand by that recommendation.
Including the will to take illegal steroids without which he wins nothing and has no fame or career in public life.
Meh, his biggest body-building claims to fame were multiple Mr. Olympia titles. Is there any other Hollywood A-list type (current or former) of which that title has been the make or break factor? Schwarzenegger's peer at the time for the same title(s) was Lou Ferrigno, and he never did better than runner up at a time in which that competition had the most cultural cache within Hollywood; he even he had his own success in Hollywood as The Hulk (and 36 other movie/TV credits per wikipedia.)
Some of Schwarzeneggar's success comes down to "sheer will" as the GP posited. Some of it is also luck (right place/right time, the right "look" for a given role, etc...) And some of it is help from others, which he seems to readily acknowledge and pass on as a message to others[1]
To say Schwarzenegger is who he is only because of steroids is as shallow of an assessment as to say it's all "sheer will".
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/o9infd/not_a_s...
edit: cleaned up a sentence.
> To say Schwarzenegger is who he is only because of steroids
Who said that? Not me.
To say he could have had all the other necessary parts, will, drive, luck and not made it without them is a different and true proposition. You don't win his body building titles and achieve fame without them, regardless of what else goes into that success and how impressive we find it (or not).
Every body uses steroids in the Mr Olympia competitions comparing it to cycling competitions is wrong .
He is born with a perfect physique and the will to work on it extensively
> Including the will to take illegal steroids
Not everyone who takes steroids ends up like Arnold, so your comment adds no value.
1. They weren’t illegal in the 1970’s.
2. All bodybuilders used them so it was a level playing field.
People should strive to be informed before commenting. There’s so much noise in the world, I feel like so much time is wasted on these little conversations.
What’s sad is that we have a culture that accepts a government telling adults what to do with their own body.
Now if the competitive leagues make it against their own policies, I have no problem with that.
Football players and boxers do a lot of harm to their bodies to participate in their chosen sports. As long as they are informed about the dangers, that’s their choice.
The 1993 movie Demolition Man had Schwarzenegger as a past (ie. prior to the main action in 2032) president by virtue of a constitutional amendment.
Schwarzenegger's political career began in 2003 as Governor of California, and an "Arnold Amendment" was actually proposed shortly after that, but didn't get any traction:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Opportunity_to_Govern_...
Arnold also used to have a huge rivalry with Stallone, and the line in Demolition Man was in part a reference to that.
I think "Last Action Hero" had a scene in a video store where there was a cardboard standup of Stallone as the Terminator.
> He's far from perfect
Arnold himself in Pumping Iron would beg to differ ;)
> all I have to do is get my posing routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know. It's perfect already.
So, basically nothing about this tracks. Arnold would have been best characterized as a right-liberal during his time in politics. He was a moderate Republican in a state that was already pretty left-leaning. Since then he's drifted a little left (focusing on criticizing Trump mostly on compassionate grounds, focusing on civic engagement, and focusing on environmental issues). I think he'd best be characterized in the global scale as something between a right-liberal and a left-liberal. The Atlantic has basically Washington Consensus politics, a little left on some issues, but basically market liberals. Maybe a more simplified way to put this: The Atlantic likely would have been closer to Clinton in the 2016 primaries than Sanders, and closer to Biden in 2020 primaries than Warren than Sanders. So it's true that they don't have identical politics, but it's not true that they're really at odds.
His life story is really inspirational, but his terms as governor sort of exposed he didn't have a great aptitude for elected politics. After he got whooped in his 2nd year midterm on the bond issues, he acknowledged that to be an effective governor he needed to get better at working with the legislature and making the case for his priorities. Then he served another six years with no major accomplishments; he never really felt like he was in the driver's seat after that midterm. He remained personally likeable, and it's true that Democrats put up only a token challenge to his second term election, but this maybe emphasizes the point: he was not in control of the issue agenda in the state, he wasn't a real threat. He didn't do a terrible job as governor, but he did do a very passive job. And in his second term when he did try to engage with the legislature, it didn't work, and mostly (as the article notes) his popularity eroded significantly. After leaving politics, he didn't really stay engaged in the party or build connections in the state, and indeed it's telling that Republicans have had a terrible record in California since.
He's never sought any federal office, and I have no idea why the article accepts the false premise that after being Governor, the only other option is to run for President. He could have, of course, ran as a Senator (Governors often do this!), ran for the house (Governors occasionally do this!), gotten involved in executive politics by taking any of a number of federal appointments that could have been open for him (or made a case for a cabinet position). He didn't. The article suggests he wouldn't mind being Secretary of State. If that were true, we'd expect him to have done... uh... literally anything connected to diplomacy in the 15 years since he left elected office?
And frankly a lot of his public engagement with politics over the last few years has been pretty surface level. He's talking directly to the public, mostly in (yes, well articulated) platitudes. I agree with him on all these issues and I'm glad he's using his bully pulpit to advocate for good things that I agree with. But mostly that's where the engagement stops. He's not day-to-day running civil society organizations, he's not building connections with politicians, he's just sort of weighing in in the same way a lot of people do on issues he cares about.
I do think there's a lot to admire in Arnold (his life story is amazing). and I don't have any hostility towards him. He's funny, he's using his platform for good, he's a sports hero, he's a unique and fun actor. I don't think he's great at doing electoral politics.
I think the Atlantic is just assuming that since Reagan was an actor, who became California governor and then went on to the White House, so naturally, Arnold who follow this template.
Also, the California governorship is not an effective model since the Legislature holds so much power and is so dysfunctional.
(hopefully by focusing on two current Republican governors and praising one and hopefully being even handed, this doesn’t turn into a political back and forth. I’m not really interested in getting into Democrat vs Republican whataboutism)
I can never see myself personally vote Republican because even the Republican politicians that I don’t have any personal antipathy toward (ie what are now called “RINOs”) still enable the ones that have cultural policies I disagree with.
That being said, I have to admit that I think some of the best governors are the Republican governors that “don’t do anything” besides act like a CEO and are more concerned with governing, bringing business into a state, balancing the budget, and don’t get into the culture wars.
I lived in GA until last year and I can say that every governor both Republican and Democrat have fit that mold since I actually started paying attention in the mid 90s.
The current Republican governor Kemp fits into that mold. He didn’t kowtow to the “election is stolen” crap. He didn’t get into the mud with Trump during his election or primary and he even signed a law making citizens arrest illegal after what happens with Ahmaud Arbery.
He even fought to bring in the “Soros controlled clean energy” Rivian manufacturing plant.
Now I live in Orlando, and Desantis is the exact opposite of Kemp.
Yeah I have never followed him much at all but my gut feeling about him pretty much agrees with you. Still no one is perfect and I think he was a better than average politician among his peers. I think one of his problems was that in an era of tea party and trumpism taking over the republican party he had no hope there. His best bet in politics was probably running for Senate but I suspect he was more ambitious than that.
It really seems to boil down to that anymore: if you don't fit the mold but do something phenomenal you are dismissed.
His politics? Do you know anything about him besides the fact he's a so-called "Republican"? He's a Democrat in everything except name. He even married into Democratic royalty. Even when he won as Govenor, we all knew his politics was Democratic rather than Republican.
Are you saying he's in denial about the nature of his politics?
> And he’s not about to become a Democrat, either. (“I don’t want to join a party that is destroying every single fucking city,” he told me. “They’re screwing up left and right.”)
No one cares about the Kennedys anymore. You too can not care about them.
I had the same impression. He didn't quote anything intelligent that Arnold said. I don't believe Arnold is that shallow. Or maybe Arnold simply didn't find the author worth the effort.
He's a pretty sharp dude.
You don't need to get to the end.
The very first paragraph tells you everything you need to know bout the article: cheap journalistic style trick.
Ugh.
Forevermore, whenever anyone mentions Arnold my brain just automatically starts playing Bill Burr’s bit in my head: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc
Perhaps a bit vulgar for the HN crowd, but I find it witty and hilarious.
A few days ago, there was a link that came by here about Agnes Callard, a philosopher who left her husband for one of her grad students. Both are well written pieces and worth reading. This article makes me think of that one because it feels like the two subjects are exactly opposite people. Both had failed marriages, but one's reaction was an almost absurd degree of navel gazing, and the other's was an absolute lack of it. Both are clearly very smart people, but one speaks almost too plainly, and the other is, well, a philosopher. It's fun to compare them.
That was a wonderful and nuanced portrait. Very much enjoyed reading.
His latest anti-hate video is extremely good, well worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsETTn7DehI
He does seem like he's being a lot more open these days, doing more self-reflection and introspection.
Can't see the rest but just after 4-5 lines they have just exposed what is totally wrong with the USA and people living there:
Putting a bike in a large SUV to go for a bike ride.
I think it’s worth reflecting on how you incorporate and use anecdotal stories to broadly characterize 320M inhabitants from one of the most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations on earth.
Yeah America is the _only_ country in the world where people transport their bikes with their cars.
Paywalled
I don't want to read this
Then don’t?